Page:Bat Wing 1921.djvu/265

 “A lady?” said Madame, softly. “Yes—continue.”

“Well,” resumed the Inspector, deceived by the soft voice, “the young lady sitting beside you was still wearing her evening dress when I arrived here last night. I found that out, although she didn’t give me a chance to see her.”

His words had an effect more dramatic than he could have foreseen.

Madame de Stämer threw her arm around Val Beverley, and hugged her so closely to her side that the girl’s curly brown head was pressed against Madame’s shoulder. Thus holding her, she sat rigidly upright, her strange, still eyes glaring across the room at Inspector Aylesbury. Her whole pose was instinct with challenge, with defiance, and in that moment I identified the illusive memory which the eyes of Madame so often had conjured up in my mind.

Once, years before, I had seen a wounded tigress standing over her cubs, a beautiful, fearless creature, blazing defiance with dying eyes upon those who had destroyed her, the mother-instinct supreme to the last; for as she fell to rise no more she had thrown her paw around the cowering cubs. It was not in shape, nor in colour, but in expression and in their stillness, that the eyes of Madame de Stämer resembled the eyes of the tigress.

“Oh, Madame, Madame,” moaned the girl, “how dare he!”

“Ah!” Madame de Stämer raised her head yet higher, a royal gesture, that unmoving stare set upon the face of the discomfited Inspector Aylesbury. “Leave my apartment.” Her left hand shot out dramatically in the direction of the door, but even yet the fingers remained curled. “Stupid, gross fool!”